Opteron-Xeon Benchmark Showdown

November 28, 2007 by

The folk over at AnandTech pitted the new 45nm Intel Xeon processors against the latest and greatest quad-core AMD Opterons to see how they stacked up on a variety of benchmarks. The conclusion was that Intel’s newest chips consistently outperform the new quads from AMD, as long as the benchmark doesn’t stress memory performance. For memory-intensive codes, AMD still wins, thanks to its integrated memory controller/Direct Connect Architecture design.

AnandTech’s Johan De Gelas writes:

There is more to server and HPC performance than simple raw processing power. Intel’s flagship still has an Achilles heel: the platform it is running on has higher latency and much lower bandwidth than AMD’s platform. Once you really stress all those cores with many threads, AMD’s platform starts to pay off.

The short-term challenges for AMD are to crank up production on its quad-core Opterons to meet demand from system vendors and to rev up the clock speed on the high-end parts as much as possible to keep them competitive on raw performance.

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